Flex, Feroze

Aparna Jayakumar

Parsi Musclemen – Inviting spectators to be looked at, receiving and responding to female, male gazes. Parsi Musclemen! What happens when a woman photographer from a non-Parsi community frames her images and captures the diversity of worlds entangled in these two words through her lens? It brings forth the powerful imagery of ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’. The documentary photographic representation of sculpted posed bodies, masculine looks, tough demeanor, of young Parsi musclemen on podiums being ‘looked’ at by the female, male Parsi spectators, keenly engrossed in the spectacle of physical prowess, invites the photographic viewer to engage with the multiple shifting meanings of socially performed gendered ‘identities’, ‘differences’ and community ‘otherness’.

Parsis are a minority community in India which is going through a fast trepidation of demographic decline. The followers of Zorastrioanism, Parsis migrated to India after the conquest of Persia by Arabs in 640 A.D and since have been an integrated part of Indian communities. Initially, settled in the port city of Surat, Parsis professionally ventured into the practice of ship-building, textile manufacturer, contractors, merchants etc. With the colonial expansion in India, Parsis co-operated with the British economic ventures thereby benefiting from the colonial infrastructures which in turn led to the upward mobility aspirations and settlements at trading centers like Bombay.¹ Parsis, despite being adaptive and intertwined with the Gujarati and Bombay cultures of India, have always maintained a sense of aloofness from the other Indian communities. They have practiced endogamy and have been avert to accepting new conversions and transgression of the inter-marriages. During the 19th century, the desire to identify with the western liberal ideas of the British may have brought modern emancipation to Parsi women, but this became obtrusive to the ethnocentric desires of maintaining racial purity. The rootedness of the migrant male subject into the conventional traditions, to maintain a sense of contact with the ‘place of origin’, was contested by the nomadic consciousness of the feminine subject who was more at home with the rootless origins.² Within the accounts of Criollo Parsi women histories, one encounters the narratives of Dossebai Jessewalla and Cornelia Sohrabjee³ (the first woman Barrister and English fictional writer in India) where they challenged the heterosexual patriarchal domination within the community, celebrated syncretic cultures and called into question the anxieties of racial intermixture. It is these anxieties, insecurities and desires to continue ritualistic traditions, celebrate heterosexual sexuality, and safeguard racial ethnicity, which underpin the visual representations of Aparna Jayakumar, shot at the Annual Zoroastrian Power Lifting and Body Building championship of 2010.

It was the last live performance of the Zoroastrian body building championship celebrating virility, youthful bodies and heterosexual masculinity which is captured in the stillness of photographs. As the championship is open only to Parsi Musclemen, over a period of time it has become difficult to find young people enthusiastic about this sport in such a small community. Interestingly, the self-styled bodies on the podium did not perform for the camera gaze but rather enacted and performed masculine gendered identities for the audiences, inviting gazes and calling into attention their appearances. In photography, the photographer’s gaze becomes prominent when the reader follows the photographer’s eye and sees the world from her position. In one of her interviews, Aparna said “Getting in and photographing the event pictures was no trouble at all. Everyone was so involved with the event that while taking pictures of the body builders, I was hardly noticed”.⁴ In these documentary representations of carnivalesque moments at the annual festival, the camera silently captures the process of ‘staging’ at work. It captures the moment of subversions within a carnivalesque space, when middle aged Parsi men gaze at the poised idealised bare bodies of young Parsi men embodying the conventional code of ‘true’ masculinity. This subverted moment of looking at the bare bodies of men by men threatens heterosexual codes, while promoting homoeroticism. At the same time, these homoerotic drives are counteracted by the rigid postures, aggressive body language and narrative plot of a conventional masculine event. The photographer frames her camera on both the viewer and the viewed, hypermasculine men who assume the passive ‘feminized’ positions of being ‘looked at’ by the middle class men, women and at the same time by young kids who look at their heroes as the model for ‘manning up’. This general symbolic order of spectacle becomes the site of determinations through which the tiny human animal becomes a social human being, a ‘self’ positioned in a network of relations to ‘others’.⁵ Images of Parsi women adoringly gazing at the objectified bodies of the males and being equal participants among spectators, points towards the growing reclamation of women’s agency within a patriarchal community. In contemporary times, this new-found prerogative by women highlights the possibility to resist hegemonic norms and fictionalised gendered identities. Within the Parsi community, it has attributed to the women’s apprehension towards the concept of marriage, family and reproduction, which has become one of the main concerns for the community’s demographic decline.

For the photographic viewer, such documented visual representation of a spectacle brings forth, the marked gender ‘differences’ and various historically institutionalized concepts of masculinities at work within a community, performed everyday to maintain the gender dichotomies and patriarchal ideologies. Within this act of performing, invented gendered categories, conventions of reality get embodied into our actions, turning artificial conventions into ‘natural appearances’.⁶ As we know, Spectacle is a reaffirmation of appearances and negation of ‘real’ but when viewed from photographic lenses, it allows the possibility to look for the ‘real’ behind ‘normal appearances’, between concealment and declaration.

References

Roshan G. Shahini, Parsis: Exploring identities, Published by Economic and political weekly, accessed on 7/6/2013.

Aparna Jayakumar is a photographer based in Mumbai. Her work often concentrates on themes such as migration, clashes of culture, religion, gender and sexuality, social contradictions, and anthropological studies of communities have engaged her the most. She was a student of Art History, Silver Photography and Ancient Greek Literature at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts in Italy and Greece. Previously, she studied Photography and Film at the Sophia Polytechnic, and Psychology and Sociology at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. She cites her greatest artistic influences as Egon Schiele, André Kertész, Raghubir Singh, Woody Allen, Wong Kar-Wai and Iranian cinema.

Jayakumar’s work has been featured in Travel+Leisure, CNN Traveller, CNNgo.com, Verve, The Sunday Guardian, Lonely Planet, Elle, Femina and other publications. She was nominated for the international photography award Prix Pictet in 2009. Her work has been exhibited at the Aegean Center in Paros, Lincoln Center in New York City, Villa Borghese in Rome, Art Bazis in Budapest, Strand Art Room and Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Mumbai and at the Delhi Photo Festival 2011. She has shot publicity stills for films such as Vishal Bhardwaj’s ‘Kaminey’, Sooni Taraporevala’s ‘Little Zizou’, and the Harvey Keitel-starrer ‘Gandhi of the Month’.